2. The study of form, or the branch of science that studies the physical structure of animals, plants, and other organisms.
3. The physical structure; especially, the internal structure, of an animal, plant, or other organism, or of any of its parts.
Gross anatomy involves structures that can be seen with the naked eye. It is the opposite of "microscopic anatomy" (or histology) which involves structures seen under the microscope.
Traditionally, both gross and microscopic anatomy have been studied in the first year of medical school in the U.S. The most celebrated textbook of anatomy in the English-speaking world is Gray's Anatomy, still a useful reference book.
The word anatomy comes from the Greek ana-, "up" or "through" + tome, "a cutting". Anatomy was once a "cutting up" because the structure of the body was originally learned through dissecting it; that is, cutting it up.
The process of gross anatomy is learning by using both invasive and noninvasive methods with the objective of obtaining information about the organs and organ systems of people and even of animals.
Anatomy is the science of the structural organization of any organism, whether plant or animal.
The macroscopic structural organization of a part or body is usually determined by means of dissection.
The term anatomy is almost a direct borrowing of the Greek anatome, because the Greeks were among the first known to systematically dissect the human body.
The Greek word is a compound of ana-, "up" + tome, "a cutting" and therefore the earlier anatomy was a "cutting up" and "dissection" remains even to this day the essential method of learning about the structure of the body.
The study of the human body was not very reliable during the so-called Dark Ages until Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), a Flemish anatomist, revived the study of anatomy with his publication of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, "The Structure of the Human Body", in 1543.